Murder Without Pity

by Steve Haberman

  “Is he armed?”

  “He can kill five ways quickly and six slowly, Pablo. Judge Cassel thinks the crime victim, Person A, confronted Person B to brag he had uncovered damning evidence against him and was going to sue. For a reason we don’t yet understand, our target, Person C—with or without any accomplice, this too, we haven’t to date determined—might have followed Person A back to his residence and again for some inexplicable reason, tortured him. This torture caused victim’s death. Target-Person C later might have killed, we believe, Person B for reasons again unknown. This, anyway, is the scenario for the moment so you best assume he’s deadly.” He paused while he took a sip of water.

  Superb, officer, Stanislas thought. Nice and vague. He flipped to a district map of Paris in the folder.

  “Field rules,” Leclair continued. “If you spot someone with this profile, you’re not—”

  “—to arrest him.” Stanislas pushed himself up. This stakeout was too vital to let anyone else explain this part. “You’re not to talk to him. You’re not to confront him. You’re not to do anything that could endanger this operation because if he suspects anything he’ll vanish, and we may never again sniff him out. This is clear? Good. I hope this is also clear: You can be sloppy here, but not out in the field. I’ll have anyone’s head, if he violates my no-contact order.” He turned to Leclair. “I’ll also explain this myself to Debré and Sébastian.” He shifted back to the agents. “What you’ll do is call me immediately. If I’m not available, Officer Leclair. I don’t care the time of day, the day of the week, if your wife’s gone into labor. You notify one of us at once.

  “Considering his profile, especially his height and drug habit, finding him isn’t impossible. It’s merely a little difficult. We’re still working on addresses to watch within each district. Meet me here tomorrow at 6 A. M. sharp for that. And remember Officer Leclair’s warning: no gossiping about this case.”

  “Your districts for now,” Leclair said. “Marco, your usual seventh and eighth. A reminder: Watch your expenses when eating in any Russian restaurants.”

  “Let’s double-team the Russians,” Stanislas said. “Give Jo Jo the sixth. There are several bookstores and libraries that cater to them.”

  Jo Jo glanced back at Marco and snickered. “I’ll work with him?”

  “We’ll try to team you with Bruno, if we get him.”

  And so Leclair and Stanislas proceeded, negotiating and coddling as they parceled out the assignments, trying to balance their operational goal with each agent’s temperament. At the end of half an hour, three of them trudged out, leaving Marco behind until he at last also left.

  As the door closed, Leclair arched a brow at Stanislas. The officer suggested what he himself feared. He fingered aside some files in his satchel and shoved the folder in without uttering anything. They hadn’t fooled any of those street-wise agents. Before the briefing, he had thought the case was turning. Afterwards, seeing how few undercovers he had, how fatigued they were, and how little cohesion there was among some of them, he didn’t know what would happen.

  CHAPTER 24

  STAKEOUT

  The stakeout’s first week began unfavorably when Leclair informed Stanislas Monday he couldn’t get Vic Debré. The hope of an added undercover faded Tuesday. The doyen of the examining magistrates within the Anti-terrorist Section at the Palace of Justice informed him he required his operative to shadow suspected Corsican guerrillas and couldn’t loan him as promised. Stanislas had to settle for his small cadre.

  To increase his pool of suspects, he chatted with Swiss authorities in several telephone conversations about their Kosovar Albanian exiles. From names later faxed, he instructed Officer Leclair to trace as many of their relatives in Paris as possible.

  Pinpointing more members of the local Russian community took less time. They had lived in Paris for centuries, as the officer explained, when late that Friday he dropped off an updated target list that included a cultural center and several Russian cinemas.

  After the third week, the stakeout’s topography took shape for Stanislas: long periods of anxiety interrupted by hopeful moments. On Tuesday of the fourth week, Marco phoned his hourly incident report nine minutes early. Not two steps from the Place de la Madeleine in the eighth, he had just spotted a hatted man, whom he estimated a head taller than average, park his Peugeot 605 Executive outside a restaurant and hurry inside. A computer check on the license plate revealed a drug record. That lifted their hopes higher until the suspect emerged, hat now in hand, and Marco saw a thatch of reddish hair, which caused Stanislas to write him off.

  By the thirty-eighth day, a Sunday, a testy disregard for rank caused from fatigue settled in that Stanislas detected when they reported. He agreed reluctantly to rotate in, starting with taking Pablo Rousseau’s place, which proved, as he had feared, a mistake. Anna’s memory came to him in the lonely confines of the Fiat. She, clear-eyed about the Occupation and the larger evil it portended. He, closing his eyes to that evil his grandfather had helped create, burying himself in his career until her murder. The mental tricks he had played on himself to avoid that period. Monsieur Lenoir’s first appointment, forgotten? More likely, delayed to avoid contact with a man, who’d lived through the war. Boucher killed during a robbery turned bad, as he had suspected? As he had hoped, he now understood, realizing he had again wanted to wish away contact with that epoch. The target of their stakeout had more likely murdered that man for a reason tied to the case and faked a robbery. Had he unconsciously suspected the moment Boucher strutted into his office the Pincus case was more than another Little Misery? And had he backed off, fearing the dossier would trigger memories of his grandfather’s complicity with the Nazi Occupation of France?

  He must stop obsessing, he chided himself, and focused outward to passersby. He couldn’t stop the thoughts. Léon, tortured by at least one sadist, the victim dying with terror in his eyes. Anna, prominent because of the Center, shoved into the path of that metro by an apparent skinhead—with a look of terror in her eyes? he wondered. And he had assumed indifference as the violence rose. He welcomed the distraction of his office when his shift ended.

  A beeping made him flutter an eyelid open and glance across to the nightstand. It was Friday night or Saturday morning. He had eaten dinner; he had skipped it. He had taken his painkillers; he had forgotten. He couldn’t remember much in his grogginess. It must be Saturday evening, he guessed, and the damn phone was ringing.

  He ignored it and turned his head away from the stand to the curtained windows. The drops thudding on the skylight over the courtyard made the world outside sound cold and miserable. Always the damn phone. He required rest like everyone else. Except that Christophe or the police or some ministry official, sanctioned with his unlisted number, must be calling. He groped across.

  Officer Leclair’s urgency broke through the static. Bruno had tried several times unsuccessfully in the last few minutes to reach him on his cell.

  “Bruno?” Stanislas asked.

  “The undercover built like a lumberjack,” Leclair reminded him.

  He must have fallen into a deep sleep, Stanislas replied, and not heard. Good thing the officer had the number to his land line phone; it rang louder.

  “I’m with him now,” Leclair said. “He’s found a promising profile. Could you be ready in, say, twenty minutes? I’ll send a driver around.”

  Stanislas blew more warmth into his cold hands as Leclair passed him a thermos of coffee. “How long has he been inside?” He unscrewed the top.

  “A little over three hours.”

  “Anyone come with him?”

  “He came alone in a car.”

  “Here, Monsieur Judge.” Bruno handed the field glasses over Stanislas’s shoulder.

  Officer Leclair had maneuvered the Fiat between two cars in front and three behind so that they had a view across the street. Stanislas gazed past the intersection ahead to a passageway, whose cobbles steamed with vapors. Puddles
reflected red from a garish FOR RENT neon sign that swayed in the chill. Opposite the vacant storefront on the right, the H TEL NORTH had boards planked across its doorway. The BAR CENTRALE, fronting the dead end, looked like any drinker’s retreat on any alley-street in Paris except this one announced itself in Cyrillic-looking letters across its poorly lit entrance.

  Parked in front of the doorway, he saw, was the vague outline of a car in darkness, making reading its license plate impossible. Squeezed between it and the bar’s left wall appeared the shape of a motorcycle. Was that the one that had nearly run him over? he wondered. Something soft pattered on the other side of the street.

  Leclair glanced right. Stanislas did too. A dog trotted past. It paused to relieve itself against a trash bag dumped on the sidewalk before scampering on toward the end of the block ahead.

  “See its owner?” Leclair whispered.

  “In this fog?” Bruno asked. “It’s hard enough seeing to the end of this street.”

  “It’s probably a stray,” Stanislas said.

  “Let’s hope so,” Leclair said. “Bruno stayed around inside as long as he could take it.”

  “As long as I thought it wise.”

  Bruno leaned forward out of the back seat’s darkness into the dimness of the front, as if to defend himself. The man bulked massively, Stanislas noticed, with rounded shoulders and a face lined like a coal miner’s and with a beery odor and a cigarette jammed into the side of his mouth. He handed the field glasses back to the undercover.

  “Bruno!” Leclair snatched the cigarette away.

  “I’m not stupid enough to light up. It’s for my nerves. This job got to me. Those guys inside looked like anarchists ready to bomb.” He snatched his cigarette back and shoved it into the side of his Peabody jacket. “Happy?”

  Leclair appeared to sense the bar experience had shaken him and said nothing.

  Bruno roughed off his knit cap with a sweep of his hand and shook his long hair loose. “I’ve been drinking there about a week. Each time I walked in, I could feel thirty eyes or so on me the moment I stepped inside.”

  “They suspect you’re undercover?”

  “If there’s shooting, you’ll have your answer, Monsieur Judge. Maybe not. You know how drinking regulars are when a stranger enters their territory? Suspicious. Afterwards, they settle down. No one asked me anything. I volunteered nothing. I was simply an unskilled laborer in for a drink after a tough day.”

  Leclair passed him a bottle of mineral water. Bruno jerked the Vittel up and gulped in savage swallows. “From what I could overhear, the owner, a Monsieur Stevanovic, a blustery guy, immigrated here from Belgrade a decade ago.”

  “A political refugee?” Stanislas held the plastic cup under his chin and let the coffee steam away cold from his lips and nose, while he gazed ahead to the bar.

  “A dreamer, who’d seen too many Parisian tourist posters in my opinion. Thought our streets were cobbled with gold. Believed every woman looked like Catherine Deneuve. Anyway, he ended up running this home-away-from-home dive for his countrymen. A huge Serbian flag across the back of the bar. Posters of a monastery and the Danube. A metal box to aid the motherland next to the cash register. Satellite TV, too. Nice and comfy, except you can do just so much with a hole-in-the-wall. Don’t ask me why anyone except Serbs would go there.”

  Leclair glanced back. “Number one, they’re probably naturalized French, Bruno. Number two, skip the editorial and get on with it.”

  Bruno ignored him. “Here’s where it gets interesting, Monsieur Judge. First, this tall guy I hadn’t seen before walks in. Next, the bartender brings him a Stella Artois without his ordering. Guy walks in. Bartender pops the cap. Just like that, and seconds later this other guy from one of the tables goes over to join him.”

  Stanislas twisted around. “Like the tall guy’s a regular?”

  “My impression exactly,” Bruno said. “Like he goes there often. See what I mean by ‘interesting’?”

  “The guy who joined him, catch his name?”

  “Slavko. Slavko-something-or-other. It’s got a mean sound, huh?” He took another savage gulp.

  Leclair peered at him. “Bruno, please, a clean report. Your brother-in-law was Albanian. He never returned from the war in Kosovo. We’re sorry to hear that. But don’t let that color anything.”

  Bruno kept his eyes on Stanislas, acting like Leclair didn’t exist. “This Slavko character joins him for a minute or two at the bar. No more than that. No chitchat. Strictly business from the first word. Before I know it, they’re through a door to the immediate left of the bar. Not the WC, if that’s what you’re thinking. What passed for that is outside. I’d used it earlier when I checked things out.”

  “Where were you seated when you saw them leave?”

  “At a table near the wall far to the left. That’s how I caught a glimpse of those wooden crates.”

  “Wooden crates?” Did they ship alcoholic beverages that way? Stanislas wondered.

  “Lots of them, Monsieur Judge.” Leclair reentered the conversation. “And stacked to the ceiling.”

  A drunk bellowed gibberish into the night.

  Questions about Bruno’s discovery could wait. Stanislas palmed away condensation from his side of the windshield and squinted. The drunk appeared to wave a bottle above his head. Another man, a head taller, joined him. He clapped an arm around the drinker’s shoulder. As he steered him back to the doorway, the glare from the lone bulb overhead caught the tall man’s face.

  “That’s our suspect,” Leclair said.

  Inside his car now, the man stoked the engine, revving the cold motor again and again. After a further moment he backed out, and his car’s blackness misted into gray. As it slipped left into a thick patch of fog, its tinted windows and sleekness made it look as mysterious as the one he had spotted from Pincus’s studio window months ago, Stanislas thought. It was unquestionably a Renault Safrane, and its expensiveness in the quarter stuck out. He tried to catch the license number, but the mist obscured its plate.

  “Mother Mary, may I earn my pay tonight.” Leclair gripped the wheel with one hand.

  Stanislas tossed his coffee out the window.

  Leclair twisted the ignition key as he tensed to see if anyone else left the bar. When no one did, he flipped on the wipers. Then he teased the Fiat out and toward the intersection, his head almost against the windshield, determined to follow.

  Losing Jules Altmann on his Italian Lake District trip must have galled the officer more than he himself realized, Stanislas thought.

  Despite the fog and darkness the quarter, at the northern edge of the Boulevard Périphérique, couldn’t hide its banality, he noticed, its bland seven-story buildings, its launderettes and garages that skimmed past. The mist couldn’t conceal the immigrant’s signs either. A poster threatened a hunger strike against the police. Another promised a demonstration at the Place de la République. Graffiti shouted ASYLUM FOR ALL, and HANDS OFF MY BROTHERS!! yelled back in solidarity. Despite the hour the downtrodden seethed.

  They traveled south for a distance, passing a long army convoy of jeeps and trucks, before swinging west. In minutes they motored along Boulevard de Clichy. The Safrane bolted through a red light. Leclair wisely braked. The thought of losing the target, though, unnerved him, Stanislas could tell, for he kept wiping his hands on his trousers. A woman with a spiked collar around her neck and a man in black jacket and tights ambled across the crosswalk. Leclair focused on the taillights that thinned to two dots in the distance. The man blew him a kiss. Leclair stared ahead.

  “This weather and riots haven’t stopped night crawlers from coming out in Pigalle,” Bruno muttered.

  The light flicked green. Leclair jammed the gas. The Fiat lurched ahead. After a time they crossed from the Right Bank to the Left at Pont de l’Alma, swung a quick left onto Quai D’Orsay for several long blocks and past an eighteenth century mansion with a pompous colonnade. Next, a right to a deserted square and
into a one-way street.

  “We just passed the National Assembly,” Bruno said in astonishment. “And over there, the Defense Ministry. This guy’s going into the very heart of the government. He’s involved in a coup?”

  The suggestion was too wild to deserve reply, Stanislas thought. Then again, who knew what to believe anymore? Leclair remained too focused to comment.

  Another turn and now past a darkened park to their left. Leclair inched the Fiat forward to the end of the short block and mumbled to himself, and Stanislas realized he was counting the seconds till he thought it safe to turn. At last he slowed his way around the corner. Halfway down the block, the taillights flashed red. The driver had braked and turned left into someone’s drive.

  CHAPTER 25

  THREE HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE

  The news affected each differently when Stanislas finished running an ownership check on the mansion.

  “I just don’t believe it,” Officer Leclair repeated.

  “You heard it yourself.” Stanislas snapped shut his cell phone.

  “Why would a family of that stature get involved?”

  “I wasn’t far off,” Bruno said. “A conspiracy financed from one of the wealthier families around. And some of the plotters living in the heart of our government.”

  “Just because the Le Brunes own that town house doesn’t make them plotters in a murder,” Stanislas said.

  “They own a lot more than that,” Bruno said. “The Le Brune line of cosmetics and perfumes. Those Loire Valley wineries. That means money, and money can buy power over me and my family, and that’s something I don’t like.”

  “There’s only one way to find out how they’re involved.” Stanislas pushed open his door and struggled out. “Call my clerk and tell him to meet me inside.”

  “You shouldn’t go in alone, Monsieur Judge.”